I am a complete newb to 3D modelling and all the associated jargon, and I’ve never used photoshop in my life. I do have a fine art background, though I completely cast it aside a few years ago in favour of Logic Pro, SuperCollider and Flash.
I am pretty good at learning from books and tutorials though, and I’m looking to spend every second of the coming weekend learning how to create some textures of my own in Photoshop, get them plastered over some basic terrain that I’m going to model in Maya PLE, and then bung it all into Unity and have a party in there.
Can anyone recommend any fitting tutorials that could help me in my weekend of baby steps?
Do not touch maya PLE I made that mistake and it costed me much time. Maya PLE does not allwo you to export the models and it saves them in a file thats specific to it’s self. You cant use them in any thing but maya PLE and you cant render them with out a huge watermark over the entire thing. Stay away…
About the photoshop tutorials… There are so many that it’s hard to recomend a few. What I would do is google what kinda of a photoshop tutorial you want, trust me you will find it.
The creators of maya certainly don’t seem to care about drawing in more users, especially independant or small studios. I agree that PLE is kind of a joke, and I’m sure its led to more people downloading cracks for maya than actually purchasing a full license.
Of course if you want a real headache, try getting an educational license of maya. Jump through a bunch of hoops to get it, and then it expires after a year! Weee!
It’s called Personal Learning Edition for a reason. Time trials never seem to do a piece of software justice, and many people won’t spend thousands on software that’s going to take ages to learn. By providing a free version the artists can learn and know the software without having to purchase it. Definitely an advantage for many companies thinking about getting it.
The people pirating it aren’t likely to pay for it anyway, so it’s not like Alias are losing money over it.
I think Maya ple is a very good option to learn the program and that’s the idea behind it. It is a good choise and is not software piracy but, to work with Unity is not an option.
You have to see you budget and fit to it or go to a friend house who has Maya and work at, export as Fbx and came back to your Unity.
I think Maya Ple should have an extra option for Unit as for Unreal engine, but is only a opinion.
I think many misunderstand Maya PLE. If you could move data out of it into programs like Unity, then why would you buy the full version? Other than not being able to export or share data files and a rendering watermark, Maya PLE is absolutely fully functional, allows you to save, and unlike Unity- has no time limit. THink about that- a program that deep and powerful allows you to use it- for free- for as long as you want.
That is an incredible resource for an industry standard program. On the mac, there is no other program that comes close to the capabilities of Maya.
I definitely do not want to go into the realm of “which modeling program is best,” but I’m curious whether anyone has ever compared an objective cross-reference of tools and features available in all popular modeling programs. I often wonder things like “is there another tool out there that would make implementing XYZ a lot easier?”
Well, ease of use is and always has been subjective to a certain degree. With Maya, I am amazed at what people have used it for. They use it to develop games- literally- there is access to a host of external renderers like Pixar’s Renderman, Turtle Render, Final Render (hopefully this is not vaporware).
There are also multiple solutions for muscle deformation, such as Michael Comet’s “Comet muscle system” - which basically runs in real time in the view port (awesome!). Etc. I can go on and on, but all mac users really have to compare it to is Lightwave and Cinema 4d, IIRC.
I owned Cinema 4d for some time and loved it (it is ridiculously fun and easy to use), but I ultimately found the character animation abilities were lacking and I wasn’t going to wait for them to get better. The modular pricing system was also starting to drain my wallet.
So I reasearched what game companies want to see on a reel/resume vs. what I could run on my not so cheap Powermac G5, and Maya won out in my eyes.
Others may find different, and many will say it’s the portfolio not the software that gets you hired.
but if it comes down to a close race between someone who knows Maya and someone who knows C4d or Blender, my money is on the person with Maya.
I must also say I found Cinema 4d’s modeling tools and selection tools in particular to be wonderful. Edgle loops, poly loops, creating selection tags- it is all smooth and very visual workflow.
I’m now getting used to Nurbs and SubDs in Maya. A different beast to be sure, especially when your final output for Unity must be polygons.
Other people swear by Modo (many have compared the interface to Lightwave), or Silo (a modeling specialty program, only $100).
I would argue that maya doesn’t really seperate itself from the competition until you start trying to rig and animate a character. If you want to make a space shooter, or a racing game, or any number of scenarios that don’t require bones then you can’t really go wrong with your choice of 3d app.
Unfortunately maya’s price tag makes it pretty unreasonable for an individual to own.
If you’re trying to get a job at a game studio, maya is your best bet, followed by 3ds max if you have the time or inclination to get fluent in two programs. It just comes down to what that studio’s pipeline is built on, and more and more studios are migrating to Maya.
Of course having an insanely awesome reel trumps all of that.
